In Defense Of Jonathan Gruber

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Full disclosure: Jonathan Gruber is both a source and a friend. He was invaluable in limning precisely how Willard Romney's ambition and sense of entitlement shredded Willard Romney's soul during Romney's failed presidential campaign.

"I'd been hired to develop the [health-care] plan, and the meeting was to decide whether or not he'd go forward with it. The meeting was Romney fighting with his political advisors. They were saying, 'Don't do this,' and Romney was saying that, no, it was the right thing to do. He was approaching it like an engineer, you know? He was saying, 'How can we make this work?' What was impressive was that he really wanted to solve a problem in the way that you'd hope a politician would try to solve a problem. He wanted to do the right thing, which is all I ever want from a politician. He was excited to do the right thing. I remember coming home and my wife, who was a big gay-marriage advocate, was saying how mad she was at Romney, and I told her, you may be, but he was pretty impressive on this."

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(I don't want to pick a fight with Scott Lemieux on this, but there was enough of Romneycare in the Affordable Care Act for Willard to have claimed not a little credit for it, and he would have, the way he did in 2008, had his party's base in 2012 not been utterly insane.)

Now, Gruber is the target du jour because of some impolitic remarks he made about how this particular sausage got made. The latest, and silliest one, is that Gruber allegedly kept secret the fact that the initial mechanism for Romneycare in Massachusetts was a bit of legerdemain regarding Medicaid. The Daily Caller, the rickety scaffold on which Tucker Carlson has hung up the bleeding carcass of his career, is thumping the tub vigorously on this one, conveniently eliding the fact that it was Governor Willard Romney who worked with Kennedy to finesse the money in question. And, also, it's not like Gruber's been seriously keeping this a secret. Again, back during the campaign, he was quite open about it with me, two years ago.

In one of history's king ironies, given the distortions that Romney has made this year of the president's remarks about how no business is built all on its own, and given his tortured position that his health-care reform was really a triumph for states' rights, Governor Romney saw an opportunity to reform health care and burnish his national profile through the judicious use of ... federal money. "Here was the deal," Gruber recalls. "Ted Kennedy was delivering $400 million in federal slush funds to our safety-net hospitals, Boston City and Cambridge Hospitals. President George W. Bush said, 'Why am I giving $400 million a year to Ted Kennedy? I'm taking that away.' Romney, to his credit, went to Bush's HHS and said, 'Instead of taking this money away, why don't we just use it to cover the uninsured?' And Bush, to his credit, said sure. "That was the money that made all this happen - federal money. It was delivered by Ted Kennedy and then rededicated at the front end to cover the uninsured."

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The only difference? In the newly "revealed" tape, Gruber used the phrase "ripped off," which, dammit, he shouldn't have done, but the idea that this was some dark liberal plot only now coming to light is complete foolishness.

The fire is not entirely coming from the Right. (And, honestly, the Supreme Court had plenty of legs to stand on regarding the ACA before anyone ever heard of Jonathan Gruber. These included Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Antonin Scalia.) But it is the Right that is going to ghost dance on this issue because it is no more interested in "governing" than it was before it elected an even more radical Congress than the one that swooped into the capital in 2010.

And yes, Republicans are going to have a lot of fun with Jonathan Gruber, the MIT economist and consultant on the law who has been saying what every Obamacare hater wants to hear: that the law was filled with trickery so it could pass Congress.They're probably not going to drag Gruber up to the Hill to testify, but they will use his comments to taunt administration witnesses and suggest that the law wasn't passed in an honest, transparent way.

You have to love these guys. They're willing to make a meal of Gruber as a political performance piece, but they probably won't call the real person who is Jonathan Gruber to testify. This is because Gruber is a lot smarter than are people like Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, he who clings still to the shreds of his freedom against the onslaught of poor people who now have medical care. So, it must be said, are the ingredients of a salad. Of course, the elite political press will go on "covering the controversy" and will not notice that the Republicans have decided to do nothing, again, because cowardly nonfeasance works for them, and because, of course, both sides do it, and Ron Johnson and Jon Gruber are exactly the same in their effect on people's lives.